


Make Yourself At Home

by anactoria



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Community: hoodie_time, Gen, Mark of Cain, Men of Letters Bunker, Post-Episode: s10e11 There's No Place Like Home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-02
Updated: 2015-02-02
Packaged: 2018-03-10 06:08:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3279644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anactoria/pseuds/anactoria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean's chugging green smoothies and Sam's fixing up the bunker. Go figure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Make Yourself At Home

**Author's Note:**

> Fill for a [prompt](http://hoodie-time.livejournal.com/954742.html?thread=12436086#t12436086) over on the [hoodie_time comment meme](http://hoodie-time.livejournal.com/954742.html): _Sam is nothing if not prepared. Its not that Sam doesn't trust Dean to fight the MOC, he just knows how strong addiction can be ... And he's not chaining Dean up in the bunker's dungeon again. So he quietly renovates a room in the bunker in case Dean has a relapse and needs to be kept away from others and safe from himself until they find a cure.  
>  Somehow it makes Sam feel a little less helpless...The process of padding walls and finding furniture Dean can't use against himself or others is painful - but it's Sam's turn to take care of Dean, and he's going to do it right._
> 
> Contains vague references to self-harm and suicide attempts.

Sam’s halfway down wall number two when he realizes he’s acting exactly like Dean.

This is how Dean copes, after all—or how he copes when the drinking-himself-stupid option is off the table, anyway. When he can’t fix people, or situations, he fixes things. Sometimes even smashes them up just to give himself something to fix. Not that Sam is that far gone just yet—though, honestly? Sometimes he looks around the bunker with its huge-ass library and its storerooms full of top-secret files and mystical objects, all of which have done zilch to help them, and he can’t rule it out. 

Point is, this is Dean’s thing. Though, with Dean chugging wheatgrass smoothies and heading off to bed on the stroke of midnight every night instead of sitting up with booze and bad TV, maybe the symmetry’s fitting.

The thing is, the Twelve Step stuff and the healthy living—it’s just a palliative. There is no simple cure for what’s ailing Dean. Sam knows it too well. He knows the haunted look Dean gets when he thinks Sam isn’t watching him; knows it from years of looking at his own face in the mirror and not being a hundred percent on whether what looked back was human.

If he mentioned his doubts to Dean, Dean would take them the wrong way. Come out with some passive-aggressive crack, or worse, some hopeless mumble of agreement—or worse still, he’d just shrug and go quiet again. Only thing Dean seems to believe in these days is his own weakness.

Sam doesn’t. It isn’t about weakness, not really. Things like the Mark, like the demon blood—they’re soul-deep. They reach into you and find anything they can use and they hold on hard and twist everything up, right in the guts of you, until you don’t know what _is_ you anymore. They take the good parts as well as the bad. Hell, probably more than half the people who’ve screwed the world up over the centuries thought they were making it a better place.

But Dean won’t hear that, and Sam can’t make him, so instead he’s just fixing up this one little corner of the world. Making it better, for when things get worse. 

He balked at padding the walls, at first. The idea of putting Dean in a room like something out of a psych ward felt a little too much like leaving him to rot. 

Only then, he walked into the kitchen a couple days after Charlie left, and found Dean just standing there, staring at nothing, punching the wall at regular two-second intervals. Methodical, not even any anger in it.

There was blood dripping onto the floor. Sam sat Dean at the table and bandaged his hand and mopped the floor, and the whole time, some part of him just kept thinking, _Man, Dean is gonna be pissed somebody messed up his kitchen._

Nothing similar has happened since—but still, the knives are gone from the kitchen drawers, and the padding’s going on the walls.

If he has enough left over, maybe Sam will do the bedframe, too, cover up its sharp edges just in case. It’s heavy enough that Dean won’t be able to lift it or break it apart, even if the Mark is giving him some extra juice. Not much furniture, other than that. A couple of soft beanbags. Nothing with corners.

There’s no lamp, either. Just a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, and yeah, you bet Sam’s tested the light fitting to be sure it won’t bear a man’s weight. He’s thought about unscrewing that, too—read stories about suicidal patients who had to have their lightbulbs taken away because they kept slitting their wrists with the glass—but the thought of leaving Dean alone in the dark keeps him from doing it, for now. 

He keeps picturing Dean’s face, back in the basement. How his eyes reflected the darkness.

No window means drapes aren’t an issue, which is a small mercy. He thought about covering the devil’s trap on the floor with a rug—or even finding some kind of fancy blacklight paint, so Dean wouldn’t have to look at it all the time—but in the end, he figured honesty was the lesser evil, so it’s right there in bold black strokes, impossible to escape from.

The whole project ought to be unnerving, but right now, it’s all Sam has beyond staring fruitlessly at the same old pages in the library. It’s a hell of a lot better than nothing. 

Honestly, the weirdest part of it is the quiet.

Not literally—he’s been hammering all afternoon. It’s just that Dean hasn’t even asked him what he’s doing, hasn’t stuck his head around the door or yelled down the corridor or even showed up to announce that he’s making a run to the store. 

Last time Sam checked on him, he was in his bedroom, headphones on, some old Beatles album playing on the stereo. Sam raised an eyebrow and Dean didn’t even scowl at him or tell him to shut up, just closed his eyes and turned to face away from the door. 

Sam let it close behind him, and tried not to wonder if he should sneak back in later and skip past “Helter Skelter”. 

The picture of Mom had been propped up in its old place on Dean’s nightstand. Sam wanted to pick it up, run his fingers over the surface of it, but he didn’t.

He’s getting to the end of the wall when he hears Dean’s bedroom door open, his footsteps echoing in the corridor. Sam drops the hammer and gets to his feet a little too fast, lengthens his stride so he can intercept Dean on his way to the kitchen.

Even from the back, Dean looks tired. His shoulders sag, and there’s something aimless in the way he moves. Like maybe he knows where he’s going, but he doesn’t really know why he wants to go there.

“Hey,” Sam says, and the set of Dean’s shoulders tightens for a second, his hands clenching into fists. Then he subsides and turns around. There are smudges of shadow beneath his eyes.

“Hey, Sammy.” It comes out slow, as though Dean’s just waking up.

“You want something to eat?” Sam motions toward the kitchen. “I was, uh, just gonna make a sandwich.” He ate a couple hours ago, actually, but the longer he can keep Dean from noticing that he’s on sharp-object lockdown, the better.

Dean shrugs. “Sure,” he says, and follows Sam to the kitchen. 

He sits at the table and looks at his hands. If he notices that there’s a padlock on the highest cupboard in the room, or that Sam has to unlock it to get to the breadknife, he doesn’t mention it.

“So,” Sam says, once he’s busy slicing bread with his back turned to Dean. “You know that picture of Mom you have?”

“Yeah?” There’s actually surprise in Dean’s voice, and Sam relaxes a little. Surprise is _something_.

“Uh—I was wondering if I could get a copy?” 

The room—it needs something. Right now, it’s almost done, set up right to keep Dean safe. Only that isn’t gonna be the hardest part. Keeping Dean _Dean_ —well, every time Sam thinks about how he’s gonna do that, he feels crushed under the weight of his own helplessness, heavy like silt in his lungs.

He sets down the final slice of bread, and turns to face Dean.

Dean raises an eyebrow. He looks a little more alert now, and that’s good, Sam reminds himself. That’s good. “DIY, family photos—you finally moving in?”

Sam opens his mouth ready to argue, because they’ve been having this conversation so long he knows the script by heart. Then he closes it again. He doesn’t need to rehash the same old fight, and he definitely doesn’t need to tell Dean that the moment he started thinking of this place as _home_ was the moment he carried his brother’s dead body over the threshold.

He cracks a smile. “Something like that,” he says.

Dean smiles back at him. It’s a weak, faltering thing. “Cool.”

“Thanks, man,” Sam says, and then has to turn away from the startled look Dean gives him.

Later, he’ll scan the photograph and print it out, cut it carefully from the sheet of paper before locking the scissors away. He’ll take it into the padded room and place it somewhere in easy view, maybe on one of the pillows. And he’ll look at the faces of his mom and his brother, smiling in front of the home he never knew, and he’ll hope like hell that they’re enough.


End file.
